According to Gadamer ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , 405), philosophy essentially began with a nominalist move. The “earliest” view saw an “intimate unity of word and thing,” so intimate that the “true name was considered to be part of the bearer of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method ,. p. 255 ) spells out the ontological import of Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy: “Things make themselves understood in their interpretation - that is, in language that speaks to us here and now . . . . Being . . . . Continue Reading »
Weinsheimer (p. 241) on Gadamer on Nicholas of Cusa: “By allying the creativity of language to the divine creativity that speaks the world into being, Nicholas of Cusa is able to conceive of the multiplicity of human locutions and languages positively. He understands them not merely as mental . . . . Continue Reading »
Joel Weinsheimer ( Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , p. 238) offers this superb summary of Gadamer’s preference for the logic of metaphor over the logic of deduction or induction: “If thought is indivisible from language, then thought is more fundamentally . . . . Continue Reading »
Gadamer’s notion that things “come into language” can sound rather abstract and abstruse. I think it’s a powerful idea. It’s powerful first because, as Gadamer is at pains to demonstrate, it means that language is not a screen that keeps us from access to the world (as . . . . Continue Reading »
In a wonderful section in Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) about questions, Gadamer says this: “We say that a question has been put wrongly when it does not reach the state of openness but precludes reaching it by retaining false presuppositions. It pretends to an openness and . . . . Continue Reading »
The time gap between the reader and the text seems to be a problem, an obstacle in the way of interpretation. Gadamer (p. 297) rather views it as productive: “Temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naive assumption of historicism, namely that we must . . . . Continue Reading »
Modern hermeneutics highlights hermeneutical circles of various sorts: To understand the part you must understand the whole, but to understand the whole you must understand the parts. To understand the author you must understand his times, but to understand the times you must understand the author. . . . . Continue Reading »
Intellectually and politically, Christianity is a stability. We have a foundation. But Christianity also has a high tolerance for instability, uncertainty, imperfection, incompletion. The reason is that our foundation is that our foundation is not below us, set in the past; rather, our foundation . . . . Continue Reading »
Gadamer waxing (Hegelian and) perichoretic (quoted in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method , p. 159): “Life is defined by the fact that what is alive differentiates itself from the world in which in which it lives and to which it is bound, and preserves itself in such . . . . Continue Reading »
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